6 Steps to Bridging the Social Media Marketing Gaps

What do you want to achieve with your social media profiles? Are you seeing the return on all your efforts? Are you keeping up just because you are supposed to, or do you have an actual plan? 1. Where is the Social Media gap? First thing you should do is to take a look at your current situation. Select a few indicators you want to use as a measuring tool. For example, these indicators can be then number of followers on your profiles, percentage of engaged followers, a total reach, amount of newsletter subscribers, number of clicks, or even number of generated sales calls. Then, list your objectives for those indicators (if you currently have 1100 subscribers but you want to have 4,000; or if you currently have 500 people follow you on Twitter but you want to have 12,000 followers)… Specific action plan Now write down specific action and steps you need to take to bridge that gap. For an instance – create topical calendar by a specific date; compose all the updates and queue them; add a time in your calendar to write newsletters; write newsletters; reach out to existing LinkedIn connections, etc. Whatever the needed action may be, write it down with it’s deadline next to it. If you have any additional goals besides the ones mentioned above, feel free to write those down, too. 2. What’s your Strategic Plan? You are not investing all this time, effort and resources just for the sake of doing it, right? No, you want to achieve tangible results and what better than actual increased revenues? The easiest way to do so is to use what you already have and optimize that. So, think about the following: • What can you do to make more from your existing customers? (For example, can you upsell them a service or product? Do you have an opportunity to cross-sell or bundle your offerings?) • What can you do to generate more new customers? (For example, can you get an exposure that you can leverage? Can you appear in front of a group of your ideal clients?) • How can you revitalize lapsed and lost customers? (Be sure to understand why they lased or left and determine how you can approach them – with new offers, different terms?) Now further develop each one onto an actionable plan. 3. What Will Be Your Initiatives? You know what they say: “A Goal is Simply a Dream With a Deadline” For the next six months, lay out the major goals you want to achieve (that align with the plans, goals and strategies you just worked on), and determine their deadline. To assure you can commit to reaching those goals, consider setting one per month, if you know your time restrictions may prevent you from achieving more. On the other hand, you need to get out of your comfort zone and break old habits in order to achieve new results. But that’s a conversation for another time. 4. Who is your target audience and where can you find it? This part of a plan should be self-explanatory: before you can do anything, you need to be clear on who are you targeting, and where your audience is. Only then can you develop messaging that will resonate with your market as well as build presence where you know you can reach them. In case you are unsure where and how to even approach this, take a look at this post. 5. Are Key Words Really That Important and Everything You Need? It can be difficult to keep adjusting to ever-changing techniques that various search engines are using to find you. But once you are clear on which keywords your audience is using when they are searching for you, it makes it all much easier. Without going into too much details on Search Engine Optimization, Google algorithms, Facebook newsfeed algorithms, and so on, do at lease the following: • Make a list of particular keywords your target audience is using • Make sure these keywords appear in the content of your website, blog, social media updates, newsletter, etc. • Make sure you expand on these key words and form actual meaningful sentences or questions – imagine what your audience would search for, or ask. 6. Just Do It Now here comes the hardest part of them all: actually sticking to the plan, implementing it and checking back on regular basis to measure the progress and results. If you are like many other business owners, then you simply don’t have the time to do all of the above consistently. Utilizing tools such as HootSuite, marketing calendar, good-old checklists and consciously setting aside a few hours per week to do all the writing and posting the updates will save you the time and headache. As an alternative, you may want to consider outsourcing this part to a virtual assistant or marketing agency. In return, your consistent presence will result in increased interest from your audience and eventually you will see increased number of inquiries.

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BIO:

Sara O. Speicher, MBA created VBM Pro, Inc. to support entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to see real return on their marketing efforts, save time, streamline operations and increase revenues. As a Virtual Business Manager & Consultant, Sara offers hands-on, done-for-you services and solutions and is committed to providing customized support to help her clients actually implement changes and take steps towards their long-term success. www.vbmpro.com

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